Jonathan Franzen will be returning with a new novel later this year in his dark comedy, Purity, following up on his previous novels The Corrections and Freedom. With so much critical acclaim for his last two novels, there’s a lot of expectation for the potential of his latest offering and we’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get added to the odd one or two book competition longlists before too long.
The novel itself has been confirmed for a release date of the 1st September 2015 when it will be available on hardback, ebook and audio book. It’ll be a fairly weighty 496 pages long, so it should be a big read for the end of summer. For anyone that missed out on the last two novels, The Corrections picked up the National Book Award, as well as being named one of the New York Times’ Best Books Of The Year in 2001 and shortlisted as a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction contender; while the release of Freedom helped him pick up the tag “great American novelist” in an article that saw him take the front cover of Time Magazine, so it will be interesting to see what Purity achieves for the author.
The story, as portrayed in the synopsis, is an odd one that leaves more questions about the book than it answers, which is often a pretty good sign. It centres on a young graduate called Pip Anderson who has managed to get to early adulthood without knowing all that much about who she is, apart from the fact that her real name is Purity. Her family is made up entirely of her mother, who she has a prickly relationship with at best, and she knows absolutely nothing about her father. She also has no idea why her mother has always hidden her own real name from her.
With massive student loan debts to pay, she lives in a squat with a group of anarchists in Oakland California until a chance meeting with a German peace activist leads her to an internship at The Sunlight Project in Bolivia. The organisation deals in world secrets and it presents Pip with an opportunity to try to track down her own origins, but a powerful relationship burgeoning with the project’s creator Andreas Wolf sends her deeper down the rabbit warren of her own morality.
It is being billed as Franzen’s edgiest novel to-date, asking questions about identity, right and wrong, secrets, lies and the search for the truth. In a world in which information is easily accessed and Wikileaks can divulge some of the world’s biggest secrets, it’s story that could be incredibly relevant to the crazy world we’re all facing these days.
